


Security

by BlackQat



Category: Case Histories
Genre: Case Histories - Freeform, Dog bite, F/M, Office Sex, deborah is always right, jackson brodie - Freeform, jackson rescue, jason isaacs roles, zawe ashton roles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 13:01:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16556249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackQat/pseuds/BlackQat
Summary: Jackson Brodie does it again. Thank goodness Deborah is there to look after him.





	Security

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Deb and Amy, and to Vin for suggestions! And "Thank You Jason Isaacs!" for bringing this character to life on screen. Yum.

\- **BLOODY BLOODY JACKSON BRODIE** -

He’s stripped and in the midst of drying his chilly wet skin when he hears the office door. No key. _Eejit, you forgot to lock it before you decided to towel off._

He grabs his wet jeans and scurries for a corner, but Deborah is too quickly through the door. “For fucksake, Jackson,” she says. “What’s this towel … what are you …” an inimitable Deborah sigh. “What happened.”

“Can you toss me the towel please,” he says, back to her, though he knows she can see his bum. He catches it; though it’s nearly wet in itself, at least it’s drier than his clothes, which are absolutely sopping wet. And muddy. And the left sleeve of his shirt is ripped and bloody. _Car seat’s going to be a mess too … and the gearstick …. Oh, shite._ His spare clothes are in the boot.

“Nice dimples there, Jackson,” comes her teasing voice.

He wraps his lower half and tucks the towel carefully at his hips and bends to pick up his jeans, then his shirt, and his underwear and socks. He glares at Deborah, even though he’s no right to, he was the numpty who forgot to lock the door. She has her hands on her hips, and is raising her eyes from his chest to look at his face. “Tell.”

“It was a dog. A kid’s dog, and the girl was going to wade in the Leith after it, and in the rain, with the current ….”

“Here’s another towel,” she says, getting one out from a file drawer. “You’ll need it to get the damp off  your car seat.”

He raises his eyebrows in surprise and delight. “You think of everything.”

“Someone has to,” she replies, but not with her usual asperity. She actually smiles. “That’s kind of sweet that you saved a kid and a dog from drowning. I don’t suppose ….”

“Ha!” Digging into the pocket of his jeans, he brings out some 50-pound notes.

“Wow,” Deborah says, taking them to put in the firm’s bank account, later. “Of course you didn’t ask for it.”

“Of course not!”

“I’m joking, Jackson. It’s nice that someone thought about your putting yourself at risk.” She’s riffling through the notes. As well as she can, anyway; they are quite damp.

“The dad was quite thankful.”

“I guess so! This is very generous! Although, considering you could’ve drowned, it’s probably just right.” She looks around. Jackson is still in his towel.

“Do you have a change of clothes?”

“In my Alfa’s boot. Brilliant, eh.”

“What the hell, Jackson?” Deborah’s pointing at dark red drops on the floor. Then Jackson’s blood-smeared arm. Her round brown eyes are wide.

“Oh … yeh … fucker bit me. Sheltie.”

“Give it! Let me see.”

He perches on the edge of her desk and holds up his arm. She has a look at it, carefully controlling her expression. “Right,” she grabs his other arm and pulls him off the desk, marching him out the office door to the loo down the hall. “Wash that thoroughly.”

“It’ll start bleeding again. I got blood all over my car.”

“Nothing some cleaner won’t fix, right?”

“It’s leather upholstery, Deborah.”

She looks at him. His expression is rueful, and he starts washing the wound. “ _Soap_ , Jackson. How long ago did you get bitten?”

He sighs in annoyance. “I don’t know. Ten, twenty minutes maybe.”

“Where are your keys?”

“On my … I think they’re on my desk. Fuck.” The soap is stinging like the graze of a bullet.

“Well they’re not locked in your car, because you got into the office. I’ll go look. If I can’t find them you’re going to A and E just as you are.”

He rolls his eyes and continues to scrub. It’s stinging but he knows Deborah is right; puncture wounds are dangerous. Of course nothing is like Bink Rains’s cats. He’d been bitten by one of them once, and ignored it for about eight hours. He’d thought a good washing would be enough … but cats’ teeth are sharper and smaller than dogs’. When his hand swelled up he’d gone to A&E and the doctor told him, “You’re lucky you got here in time,” and shot his hand with a steroid and sent him home with antibiotic pills. Apparently he had just avoided sepsis, nerve damage, gangrene, rot and a terrible, painful death. As he scrubs he imagines Marlee describing this with gruesome glee and smiles a little.

No danger of rot this time, he hopes, finishing with the soap. Now that he’s rinsing with cool water, the blood flow has slowed again.

“Sorry, Jackson,” Deborah carols, coming back down the hallway. “You’re stuck. Did you bring in your coat?”

His face freezes. He can see his Barbour clear as day. “ _Damn it!_ I left it on the riverbank.”

 “At least you had the sense to take it off—”

He glares, and she’s quiet, but quiet with a smirk.

“Okay, let’s get going.” He pauses to look at her. “Seriously, you couldn’t find my keys?”

“No, Jackson,” she says with heavy sarcasm. “I _want_ you to ride in my car with a wet towel on you.” She grabs a wad of paper towels and goes to her desk, fetches out a stocking and fixes the wad to Jackson’s dog bite, tying the stocking around his forearm. “Just in case you start bleeding heavily again.”

He raises an eyebrow skeptically and she steps into the office, gets the other towel, and puts it over his shoulders.

“Your poor little feet,” she says as they get to the street. “It’s freezing out here.”

“You’re telling me,” he mutters, standing at the passenger side of her car, casting a longing look at his Alfa Romeo. Deborah, in her car, leans over to open the door for him. A passerby stares at him, and Jackson shrugs. _All in a day’s work, mate_.

 _Shite_ , he thinks as he steps into the car. He’s wrapped his towel with the opening edge to his right. Where Deborah is. Because he was planning to drive, and the opening would have been next the door ….

He reaches up for the seat belt, rolling his hips a tad, and as he fastens it he notices Deborah hiding another smirk. “I saw that.” He shakes a finger at her.

She gives him some playful side-eye down toward his lap and says, “I saw _that_. Just a glimpse though. Nice.”

His mouth drops open a little; he lays his head back on the headrest in resignation. “You will never ... ever ... give me a break. Will you, Deborah.”

An outright smile now, as she starts the car, racing the engine a bit.

“You know that’s bad for it, right?” he sighs.

“Yes. I know,” she says, pulling out hastily. “And I don’t care. It makes me feel better.”  


At the hospital they take his towel and wrap him in some warm blankets for a while, and hot tea is brought; he drinks it down. A nurse brings some slippers and a pair of surgical-type “scrubs” for him to wear. They wash his dog bite some more, with that bright orange surgical stuff, pat it dry and swab more on his arm, then put a sterile dressing on it, one of those you can wear in the shower with great confidence. _It’ll probably strip the hair off my arm._

“Oh you’ll be stained orange for days, Jackson,” Deborah says, seemingly delighted.

He is sorry now that he went up to the office at all. That he didn’t drive home, shower, find a way to dry the Alfa’s car seat and get the blood out of its carpet and off the gearstick and steering wheel and probably some dripped on the leather upholstery….

Just thinking about all the work ahead makes him tired. He wants to go home and drink half a bottle of whisky, get snug in his bed, sleep and forget this. _At least I got paid something._

He yawns as the doctor, a short, roundish and sweet-faced woman with wee wire-framed glasses and a blunt brown haircut, shakes a small bottle of pills at him. “Take one now and follow the instructions precisely. And finish all the medication even if you feel better. Don’t fool with evil bacteria. Be sure to let us know immediately if you’ve any tingling or numbness in your hand, the bite got close to your ulnar nerve.” She gives him a _look_ , the same look he gets from a lot of women. An impatient sort of _I wish you would do what’s good for you_ look. “Go home and rest. Drink warm fluids. You have had quite a chill.” It’s back to the office in his scrubs and flimsy slippers, but Deborah has her car heater turned all the way up.

In the office his jeans, shirt, socks and shoes, of course, are still wet, and there’s no access to his house unless he can find the bloody key— “Deborah,” he says warningly.

She appears in the doorway of his inner office. Her eyes are as wide and bright as Marlee’s when she’s just told the biggest whopper. “What?”

He pulls the keys up from smack in the middle of his desk and shakes them, looking out from under his brows at her.

“I wanted you to remember every moment, Jackson,” she says, a bit smugly. “Now are you convinced you need a complete change of clothing in the office here, as well as in your car? And a couple of towels?”

“Are you fucking serious?”

“Yes.” She strides over to him in those impossibly high heels and cocks a hip onto the edge of his desk. “I _am_ fucking serious. You need to take better care of yourself. What were you going to do about the dog bite? Nothing, I bet.”

Looking down, he can’t help it, his eyes trace the rounded outline of Deborah’s upper thigh. Ordering her about some times like she’s a dogsbody and being cross were bad enough, and he regrets those actions of his since he hired her, but now, to be checking her out sexually? Not good. Harassment. He reluctantly meets her eyes. “You want to take care of me, is that it?” His gaze is a little pissed off and a little challenging.

“Let me drive you home, Jackson.”

“No.”

She holds out her hand. “I’ll get your clothes and bring them up then.”

“I’ve got it,” he snaps. He stumps out of the office in the slippers and scrubs and Deborah has to hold in her laughter.

A few minutes later he’s back, clothes under his arm, boots in one hand. He heads for his desk. Deborah shakes her head at him, gesturing at the large uncurtained windows, filled with the dusk-silhouetted skyline. “Change out there, in Reception, unless you want to give Edinburgh a show.”

“I can’t be arsed,” he mutters. “Turn your back.”

She looks out the window. Ostensibly. She’s watching Jackson’s reflection. He strips down efficiently. _Nice body_ , she thinks. Well-muscled back, arms, legs … too many tattoos on his arm, but it’s not like she wants to marry him. He’s changed in under a minute. Well, not counting buttoning up his shirt. “Is it safe to turn around now?”

“Yes.”

He’s grumpy, and no wonder. Cold, wet, embarrassed, and left. Jodie and Marlee left last week for New Zealand and his actress hasn’t been by either. When Deborah asked him about her, he frowned and changed the subject.

This could be why he’s forgotten things he normally wouldn’t.  Jackson, if overcommitted on behalf of his clients, and solving cases he shouldn’t be bothered with, is usually very methodical about his _things_. Car, watch, coat. He’s ridiculously intuitive when it comes to the people in his cases, but can’t apply this to his personal life. _Poor Jackson_. Deborah is sure that every woman he’s known personally thinks this. _Poor Jackson_.

He’s putting small pieces of a torn-up sectioned sheet of paper between all the papers in his wallet. Tosses a sodden mound of “Jackson Brodie Private Investigator” business cards in the trash, and tromps out to get more from Deborah’s desk. He’s probably peeved that he kept the wallet in his trouser pocket when he waded in after the dog.

He comes back into his office and gives Deborah a stony look. “Told you I didn’t need a ride home. You’re way over your time.”

“Jesus, Jackson, you can be a wanker,” she snaps. “ ‘Oh thanks for the ride to the hospital, Deborah, I really appreciate your making sure I saw a doctor for what could have been a terrible infection’.” She’s ready to stride out, but leans against his desk and fixes him with a stare of her own.

He turns his head to one side and raises a hand to his forehead in the universal _oh shite_ gesture. “I’m sorry,” he says. His voice sounds a bit odd. “You took good care of me. Thanks. I’m going to go—”

It’s a rare thing for Deborah to do anything impromptu except verbally express herself. But she quickly steps over to him and gives him a hug. He’s so surprised he barely manages to open his arms in time. But when he does he squeezes her tight.

“Oof,” she says. He loosens his hold and she moves her head to look at his face. Creased up with emotions. She gently kisses his cheek.

He turns his head so his mouth meets hers, and kisses her roughly, deeply. Not the way she had imagined. One of her friends who met Jackson said, “I think he’d be a bit wet in bed,” but he was proving her wrong.

Deborah is feeling something she hasn’t for awhile. There was a bad breakup about six months before she came to work for Jackson. And she tamped her fires down after that, even stepping back on the “rebound” one-nighters. Now she kisses Jackson back, her lips urgent, her tongue moving greedily in his mouth, and he responds with the same hunger. She steps backward, kicking off her heels, pulling him toward the wall, not caring if she and Jackson give the buildings across the way a live sex show. Her hunger is great and she feels positively wanton.

Sighs and grunts and his belt unbuckling and a hot mouth on her bosom over her braline then through her bra, then he nudges it downward with an impatient thumb and nips the tip of her breast; her legs nearly give way, but he catches her, cupping her rear, sucking her breast, hiking up her skirt, trying to slide her panties down ….

“Rip them,” she says. “It’s okay, I got them on sale.” She grins cheekily and dives back into his mouth and his hand is strong on the back of her head and “God, you feel so-o-o good,” she mutters into his neck, his skin smells just right, the pheromones click. Her hand cups his crotch and unzips his jeans, then unbuttons the top, and parts him from his underwear, and she strokes his cock and fingers his balls and her other hand is pressing his lower back toward her as she lifts a leg to give him passage. They fuck, hard, needily, quickly, and his eyes are closed; he’s handsome for someone older than her usual, and maturity is good for experience is good for is good “Ohhh, so …” she gasps. “Oh …!”

His hips jerk, and she feels him pulsing inside, and suddenly his very blue eyes are staring earnestly into her brown ones. “Aw Christ that was ….” He leans his forehead to hers. “I’m not so sure I should’ve—”

“Sssh. I offered,” she says, reassembling her clothing and trying to steady her legs. The high heels can wait a minute.

He tucks in his shirt, zips up and turns to lean against the wall, letting his head clunk on it. “I don’t know ….”

“Don’t apologize,” she snaps. “For fucksake let yourself feel good, will you?”

He shakes his head, grinning. “Deborah, you’re very bossy, you know that?”

She steps back into him and slips her hands around his waist. “Yes, I am. I know when and how I’m needed.”

They stand like that for awhile. He strokes her hair, and kisses her throat, and looks her in the eyes again. “Yes, you do. Thanks.”

“You’re very welcome.” They grin at each other and snuggle a bit, standing together.

He’s so warm. His arms feel good around her. _Job security,_ she thinks with irony. _Fucking the boss. What the hell is wrong with you?_ But she feels secure in another way. Fucked up as he can be, Jackson is also … reassuring. And that’s a nice feeling to have, reassurance. She hopes she gave as good as she got.

 


End file.
